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................ In conclusion I should say that in a long bitcoin cycle an investor should have at least 6 months to 2 years of cash flow so that he can keep buying and holding more than every bearish.
I think that everything that you say laijsica is correct, except you are very broad in terms of how much back up funds that I guy should maintain, and you are even quite non-specific about the purpose of your various back up funds.
Of course, if shit really hits the fan and income dries up and/or expenses go way up, then there is going to be a lot of good feelings and/or comfort to have more money available to hopefully make it through the difficult period without having to suffer too much... and so yeah, their would be heirarchies in regards to the various kinds of classifications of back up funds, and I think that 3 months of expenses is almost necessary for most everyone who is investing, yet a brand new investor could simultaneously build up his emergency fund while he is building up his bitcoin holdings... so for someone who might have had been living with only 2-4 weeks of back up funds, it could even take a year or more just to build up both his back up funds (his emergency fund) and his BTC holdings to amount to 3 months of expenses each.
Once an investor gets to a point in which he has both emergency funds and his BTC investment up to those kinds of 3 months each levels, then at that point, he may well need to take into account his own circumstances to figure out how to go about saving other kinds of reserve funds that may well depend upon how unreliable his income and/or how likely it could be that he is going to suffer from unexpected (or somewhat expected) expenses, and so the more unreliable his situation, the more reserve funds he should be building and maintaining to account for these kinds of possibilities.. because what good would it do to be saving, suffering and struggling to build up a BTC investment portfolio for a year or even for several years, and then all of a sudden suffer a cashflow disappearance issue or some kind of expenses that were somewhat expected and then end up being forced to sell some or all of your BTC holdings at a time that you did not want to and because of circumstances that were somewhat foreseeable.
My main point is that the extent to which cashflow/expense problems are foreseeable likely create more obligations to hold more funds in reserves, and also BTC investors should also be careful that they sufficiently conservative in terms of both planning for emergencies and also to plan for situations that might not seem very likely to happen, yet of course, when those less likely events happen, there likely are ways that anyone will be quite thankful to have emergency funds and/or various kinds of backup funds in place, and so there should also be attempts to keep funds that you never end up have to use, but at the same time trying to tailor the amounts to your own situation in regards to considering how much BTC are you trying to protect, and so perhaps the longer that you are in bitcoin, it becomes easier to have had built various kinds of backup funds, and more likely that, even though it is not guaranteed that your bitcoin are going to be profitable, there still comes more likelihood with longer passage of time that you should be able to see progress in your building in terms of the various kinds of cash cushions that you have and how you might be maintaining those cash cushions in various kinds of ways. In the first 2-4 years, there are likely to be more struggles to build up various kinds of back up funds and to build the BTC portfolio up at the same time.
Bitcoin investment is inherently risky and we should invest with that risk in mind.
Yeah actually there is no investment without Risk and bitcoin is not excluded too, but I don't think bitcoin is as risky as other forms of investment. With the little knowledge I have about bitcoin from the past years, the only thing I know is risky is just rise and fall which is normally volatility. and that is the more reason you should invest in bitcoin than talking about risk. The risk you presume about bitcoin, most people have been Able to accumulate alot of starshes expecially during price correction or bitcoin dip. What you complain to be risky is what others are taking advantage from it. I guess you should think of accumulating than talking about risk.
I am not claiming to know exactly what is "risk," yet it seems to me that there are many folks who are referring to BTC price volatility as risk, yet many of us already know that one of the most inevitable things about bitcoin is that its price is going to be volatile both to the upside and to the downside, so each of us who invests into bitcoin, we likely are hoping and/or expecting that bitcoin's volatility to the upside is going to be greater than its volatility to the downside, so even though it is not guaranteed to be the case that UPside is going to be greater than DOWNside, each of us should be attempting to figure out a BTC position size that attempts to account for our calculation or how likely we consider the upside to be greater than the downside and how much of our disposable income are we willing to allocate into bitcoin.
So if we have less confidence and more worries about the whole weighing of the volatility situation, then likely we should be investing a smaller amount in order to account for our worries about the strength of bitcoin's investment thesis.. and so we have to live with the consequences of the level of the aggressiveness of our choice to invest into bitcoin, too.
Another thing that each of us should be calculating is our abilities to make sure that we survive through the ups and the downs of what we already know is going to be bitcoin's volatile price periods so that if BTC prices do end up going up within our investment timeline (which is hopefully 4-10 years or longer), then we are going to have had survived through such volatile periods and still be holding most if not all of our BTC and even better that we would have had been building our BTC stash through all of those difficult times so that we become more likely to end up having way more options because we were able to build and hang onto our BTC stashes rather than failing/refusing to act and failing refusing to build up a adequate/sufficient BTC stash because of our being scared because of volatility that is likely already known from the beginning and/or scared from the various uncertainties of not exactly knowing how the whole BTC investment matter is going to play out, even if we had been considering BTC as an asymmetric bet to the upside in which the most that we could end up losing would be 100% of our investment (as long as we did not engage in leveraging and/or fucking around with trying to trade.. such as selling for purposes of trying to buy back cheaper, which seems like mostly a game that is going to result in uncertainties and losses as opposed to a practice that almost exclusively focuses on various ways to buy and/or accumulate BTC without selling it. except perhaps sell and replace).
But we must be very careful in investing in Bitcoin, if we can invest carefully, Bitcoin can achieve a lot of success.
I want to make it clear to you that investing in bitcoin is not a risk to me, because in a lung run success will be achieved. What I count to be risky is investing in shitcoins or when you think of a risky investment think of shit/altcoin or some sort of gambling coins. apart from that anything bitcoin investment to me is an asset for future profit.
Sure, you seem to be making an additional point that bitcoin is much more assured than getting involved in shitcoins, so hopefully anyone who is tempted to gamble, trade and/'or get involved in shitcoins is not using any more than 10% the size of his bitcoin holdings in order to engage in such activities.. and hopefully also not cheating in terms of allowing more than 10% to be put into gambling, trading and/or shitcoin involvement after losing it along the way.
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Yep. time in the market tends to be much better than timing the market, and so whenever we are making our DCA buys while we are accumulating BTC, we buy BTC with the belief that it is good to get in and to get more BTC. Personally, I think that there can be some times in which it takes a while for the BTC price to work itself out, and so there could be extended periods of time in which our portfolio holdings are in the negative, yet I have my doubts that there are many folks who are in the negative after a few years of ongoing DCA. Yeah, sure the more problematic portfolios would have been the ones who made decently large BTC purchases towards the top of the BTC price range, and then his subsequent DCAs at lower prices were not enough to overcome the earlier lump sum buys at higher prices, so there surely can be some BTC portfolios that might take a while to get back into profits, even after several years of ongoing BTC buying.
Most of us also recognize and appreciate that there are no guarantees in BTC that it will end up being profitable, so we likely consider bitcoin as an asymmetric bet to the upside in which the most that we can lose is 100%, so in that regard, we should be choosing our BTC investment size in accordance with our weighing of these various considerations as well as considering our other
8-9 personal factors.
There has been a ton of true statements that you made in that post. I am not going to address them one by one as I am a little bit short on time, but one thing that people can't get into their heads is that it is still early days for BTC. More reasons will come why a decentralized currency (or reserve tool or whatever someone wants to use it for) will find its way into society in wide spread fashion. The only thing that gets me concerned at times is the pace of development. Frankly, I am not even up to date how that is going and what the pace is at which advancements happen.
I doubt that any normal people are really able to keep up with all aspects of bitcoin's ongoing developments, and even folks who are working with and on bitcoin full time, likely have trouble keeping up with areas of bitcoin's development that might not be exactly within their own area of working with and/or on bitcoin.
I have said a while ago that technologies like the lightning network should in a best case scenario work more like a plug and play, like an app, someone presses connect and there you go. Similar to a VPN or even the TOR browser where someone can connect their wallet and then benefit from LN as the rest will be done automatically in the backend.
Of course, we seem to have always had these user-friendly questions, and even though some jurisdictions have been acting as if they are friendly to bitcoin, at the same time, there are ongoing attacks on developers who create apps to empower the abilities of individuals to directly interact with bitcoin and also ongoing attempts to control on and off ramps to assure that everyone is KYC'd, traceable and attempts to maintain and build control over abilities for individuals to interact in privacy, which also likely relates to how some of the individual sovereignty tools can be developed when there are various sly ways that they are being attacked through control mechanisms, including forcing miners to go through pools (while it does not seem so much like forcing when there are ongoing incentives that contribute towards people wanting to KYC themselves for the sake of supposedly getting better payouts and more convenience), and I am not even suggesting that I know the answers to these various kinds of dynamics that likely take away from several aspects of what causes BTC to be powerful.
But apart from these issues, the number of people owning BTC is still small. It's actually tiny. People are too obsessed with the price instead of the network potential. Of course when someone sees that it was once pennies and now it's in the tens of thousands, it looks like they are late to the party. But price is probably one of the worst metrics to base their decision on.
There have always been perceptions that bitcoin is overpriced based on past performance people get afraid that they are buying at the top, so it becomes difficult to address these kinds of ongoingly wrong perceptions... yet at the same time, BTC prices continue to increase and are likely going to continue to increase into the future for quite a long time with no coiners and low coiners continuing to fail/refuse to sufficiently/adequately prepare for UP because they don't want to buy at the top, and so they are not tending to know enough about bitcoin in order to realize that any time is a good time to buy bitcoin and that the only way to sufficiently/adequately prepare for UP is to buy some bitcoin, and so their ongoing scared-i-cat-ness about buying at the top should more likely affect their starting out position size rather than causing them to fail/refuse to start buying, so there seems to be almost no way to save people from their own ongoing and persistent wrong thinking about bitcoin - except to just recognize and accept that people get bitcoin at the price that they deserve and if they don't get in sooner, then they are just going to end up getting in later, and most likely at a higher rather than a lower price.
so we likely consider bitcoin as an asymmetric bet to the upside in which the most that we can lose is 100%
That sounds reasonable to me, but I still think that BTC can barely be stopped from expanding unless there is some fatal flaw or threat that hits the network out of nowhere. I find the fact that governments are now paying close attention to BTC very interesting. Because now they all know that being late to the party could have geo strategical consequences in the long term. Some of them probably build at least a little reserve and hence remove more circulating supply.
Yep.. we have individuals, institutions and governments, and bitcoin creates similar kinds of incentives for each of the categories, even though the dynamics with each are likely more complicated with each level that you go up, and individuals have the most flexibility to act quickly and with fewer burdens and complications, and some of the bigger institutions and governments might have more complications to both decide whether and/or how to get into bitcoin and even how to act once they have decided in the affirmative to get into bitcoin. Likely you suggested, they are all likely coming into bitcoin, it is just a matter of when, and individuals have quite a bit of luck to be able to front-run some of the BIGGER and the insider players that tend to not so much be available in other kinds of investments.. but even anyone who is attempting to front-run anyone else, whether an individual, institution or a government, they still have to act to start buying, once they had come to the conclusion that it is to their advantage to get in rather than failing/refusing to get in.
The whole "waiting for the dip thing" is flawed. The only approach I would somewhat accept is if someone has a set in stone threshold and if that is hit, a lump sum is going to be used to build a substantial stash (relatively, depending on the individual). I think those who talk about waiting for the dip are also those who panic when their chosen threshold is reached, they buy and then BTC crashes further and they sell again because they panic.
I am not opposed to the idea of anyone employing all three BTC accumulation strategies (DCA, lump sum and/or buying the dip), as long as they appreciate the trade offs (and potentially the reasons) for employing each of the strategies. Lump sum and DCA seem to be the best strategies for beginners, yet anyone who successfully front loads his/her investment in the very beginning might then be o.k. to incorporate buying on the dip thresholds, and surely I am not in agreement with fucking around with all or nothing thresholds, but instead staggering thresholds in a ladder kind of a manner, yet that ladder kind of a manner of staggering entry buy points seem way more appropriate for guys who have already bought rather than some no coiner or low coiner waiting for an entry point when there is no guarantee that BTC prices are going to go down rather than up, so it would seem like just gambling if someone is setting himself up to buy on dips without having had already bought some BTC already. But, hey whatever, people can do whatever they like, even if they do dumb stuff such as structure waiting into their BTC strategy in the event they either do not have any BTC or they already know that they don't have enough BTC to be sufficiently/adequately prepared for up.
We have said this dozens of times, nobody knows where exactly a correction or crash makes the U-turn. If Wind_FURY believes that this is the way to go for him, then fine, but propagating that it is a golden formula is utter nonsense. Maybe he should start a dedicated thread and post his decisions in real time, so we can see whether he is making the right calls all the time or not. My modest guess is that he is 50% right and 50% wrong, so why not just flip a coin once a week, buy when tail shows up and don't buy when heads show up
Wind_FURY already created this thread with the buying on the dip theme, so I am not sure what good any additional thread showing his actual BTC buys (or his ongoing waiting to buy) would accomplish. Even though he does not really seem to acknowledge that he is wrong, he does give in on topic from time to time, so I don't really see any problem with him continuing to argue buy on the dip and waiting for the dip principles, even if he seems to be wrong on the part that he frequently does not acknowledge that the waiting for the dip practices is likely better for folks who have already accumulated decent and sufficient BTC stashes to prepare themselves for up, and even he likely fits in that category. I think part of Wind_FURY's problem is that he sometimes seems to slip into buying on the dip as if it were the best strategy, especially when he starts to get feelings that a dip might be coming... hahahahahaha.. which is kind of crazy when you think about it... it is like saying.. I can feel a dip is becoming more likely to come. .therefore, I am now recommending and emphasizing the values of waiting for the dip. before buying bitcoin, whether you have BTC or not .. just waiting seems good since if you wait and the BTC price goes down, you will end up being able to get more BTC for the same amount of dollars, and sure it is true that if the BTC price goes down, then you will be able to buy more BTC with the same amount of dollars, but yeah whatever, it is almost impossible to know if the BTC price is going to go down or continue to go down, and frequently the brand new person to bitcoin (which is a no coiner) should not be messing around with trying to figure out if a further dip may or may not be coming, and even any person who is either new to bitcoin (and has only a few coins) or who has been in bitcoin for a while, but has concluded that he does not have enough BTC, even those people probably should not be spending time and energies trying to figure out whether there might be a BTC price dip or not prior to just continuing to buy BTC... so yeah, at a certain point, the quantity of the BTC likely starts to affect how much of an ability someone might start to feel that he has the luxury to wait for a dip rather than just buying at whatever might be the current price.
Those who are new to Bitcoin investment must acquire enough knowledge about Bitcoin before investing in Bitcoin. If they do not acquire enough knowledge about Bitcoin then they will not achieve good success in Bitcoin investment.
How do we measure the knowledge to know at which point the knowledge is deemed enough before investing in bitcoin? At the end of the day you will find out that you are really neglecting what's important (investing) and doing something which ordinarily you can do later while you have already invested. What exactly are you doing with enough knowledge while all you need is just a basic knowledge of how to buy bitcoin. Sometimes even people with zero knowledge about bitcoin do invest and successfully hold on to it. Sometimes I think those who stress about having enough knowledge before investing in bitcoin are actually people who have the mindset of trading, because these are people that are more concerned about knowing everything about bitcoin.
Those who have the mindset of holding for long term don't actually stress in knowing everything about bitcoin before investing. The most important thing for them is just buying the bitcoin. What is the purpose of having knowledge about bitcoin without having any Bitcoin in your possession? but it will be more profitable to people who hold bitcoin even without having enough or any knowledge about bitcoin.
At the end of the day it is the amount of bitcoin in your possession that matters and not the level of knowledge you have about bitcoin that will count. In nutshell, invest the moment you have the opportunity and go for whatever knowledge you want to acquire down the line.
I think that it is important to point out that no one is really rejecting the idea of having knowledge or even suggesting or promoting the idea of ignorance, yet one of the most important pieces of knowledge tends to be very basic, and that is if you have $10 in your wallet, you have to be in enough of a position to know whether that $10 is within your disposable income or if you actually need that $10 for expenses.. and if you invest into bitcoin for 4-10 years or longer with that $10, are you going to need that $10 in an earlier time. Yeah sure, you have to likely figure out how to get your bitcoin and various other things, but you can learn those matters along the way, and likely the more you invest into bitcoin and the longer that you invest, the more incentivized you should be in order to figure out various aspects of what bitcoin is and why you are investing into it... so probably when you invest that first $10 into bitcoin, then you likely merely need to have enough confidence in bitcoin (or the advice that you are getting about bitcoin) that it is better to buy some of it rather than not and that it could take 4-10 years or longer before you would be considering drawing upon your investment, so you likely realize that you are going to need to learn some of those kinds of matters along the way including if you continue to accumulate bitcoin how are you going to do it and where are you going to keep it, and so it would seem that with common sense, the more and more that you build up your bitcoin investment, the more incentivized you should be to want to make sure that your bitcoin investment is secure, since most people invest with an expectation and a hope that they are going to be better off for investing rather than not, yet at the same time, people who invest might also likely realize that they might end up losing up to 100% of the amount that they invested.
Ultimately, a lot of the particulars about owning bitcoin can be learned along the way, and so the most basic aspect of bitcoin would merely concern the extent to which you have any disposable income, and so you can size down your initial investment amounts into bitcoin in order to assure that you are not drawing upon money that you actually need (or that goes beyond your disposable income) and you may also have to have a little bit of confidence that it is better to invest into bitcoin rather than not, even though you may well not have much reason to have confidence in your investment into bitcoin except maybe based on a recommendation or a hunch, yet the more that you invest and the longer you are in bitcoin, it is likely incumbent on you to learn more, yet how much you learn, how you learn which parts you focus on are all discretionary matters, and each person is responsible for his own level of learning, even if getting started requires almost no knowledge beyond just knowing whether the $10 (or whatever other staring amount) is within your discretionary income, and sure there are some folks who do not have very good grasps over what is their discretionary income versus if they are taking from money that they need, yet they are responsible to figure that shit out...
and it is on them if they are investing into bitcoin or anything else with money that they actually need, which I would suggest to be gambling rather than investing, and if they don't know the difference between investing and gambling, then maybe they are going to need to figure that out, yet I doubt that they really have to know prior to getting started, and they are going to be responsible for their own actions if they are actually gambling and erroneously calling what they are doing as investing... I expect a certain level of common sense for people to figure out these kinds of basic matters for themselves, even though it is true that there are a lot of people who don't really understand or appreciate the difference between investing and gambling, but I am not going to assume that they cannot get started in bitcoin and figure out those kinds of matters along the way and if they make a mistake, that is on them.. We have bitcoin, which is likely amongst the best, if not the best, of investments that are available for folks especially if they are able to establish a 4-10 year or longer investment timeline, and so if they come into bitcoin balls to the walls and they cannot figure out basic ideas of starting out conservatively and controlling position size as they are figuring things out, then yeah some people are going to end up being their own worst enemy, but without knowing more I am not going to stop and tell them to study the matter. I am going to suggest that the best thing for them to do is to get started as soon as they can and as long as they are using discretionary income and they are planning to invest 4-10 years or longer. The rest is on them to figure position size and the various details about how to do it, or perhaps if they want to ask some questions that are particular to their situation, then no problem, shoot your questions and I will see if I can be helpful beyond just suggesting that they look into the matter, such as which exchange to use or where to make their first purchases, which may well vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and what might be going on in the area that a person is and they might have to research into that or ask someone who knows regarding where to begin to source their first coins.
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In addition, if they do not have knowledge, they do not know how much Bitcoin supply is, who created bitcoin, and what are the advantages of Bitcoin and how bitcoin is progressing throughout the world. Is that important for an investor to know? My answer is yes, they must know the history of bitcoin and its ongoing development.
My answer is no. They do not need to know that stuff when they start. They can learn along the way. Maybe they start out investing only $10 per week and after they learn more, then they increase to $50 per week, and then as they learn even more they increase to $100 per week.. and so yeah, there could be ways that some folks learn faster than other folks, and one of the better ways to inspire anyone to want to learn more and faster is when they are starting to invest into bitcoin, even if their first investment amounts might be quite lower than what they otherwise would be capable and potentially willing to invest if they were to have more knowledge.
